LX14102316EXIT
by KING FELIX
Summary: 23rd on my mind, and if ever one of these things wrote itself.
LX14102316/EXIT

Once Upon A Time.

In the European Union.

The technician in the maroon shirt gazed at his pallet-load of work, double-checking the mass of electrical components were ready to be shipped. Perhaps this was care or diligence, though the air surrounding him was filled only with paranoia. Already his colleague had swung free his own pallet and was making a route towards the furthest reaches of the dispatch warehouse; Wojciech, age twenty-five, Polish, always smiling or ready to smile -and for what reason? It was an internal defence against any trace of racism or prejudice that he wanted to understand his immigrant co-workers as much as possible. The maroon-shirted man wanted to understand everything.

Working in a modern warehouse, of course: the overhead floodlights were the prime mover of any emotion, the human desire to scan for shadows or hidey-holes fully defeated by a universal pool of yellow. Through an unflickering mescal-sheen, it was all-too-easy for the brain to process those highly-focused surfaces into deadly-dry TV sets, probably from some old black-and-white CBS noir. 'Nowhere to hide in the entire world' would be a reasonable psychic impression for any new visitor, and meanwhile pausing not a second longer than you had to.

Paces apart, they made a two-man convoy past the overhead offices and the re-work pools, the industrial sorting machines, the radios blasting out wholesome local stations. Wojciech flexed his body and tightened-up his overly-stubbled mouth. Certainly there was a desire in the maroon-shirted man to understand the boy's good humour, but that was hardly the _crux_ of the matter. He wanted to understand how he himself could have become a _proxy_ -immigrant, in his own country, and musing this as 'Breath FM' blasted out 'Gone, Gone, Gone' by Plant and Krauss. Finding himself low-waged and undervalued when he was more committed to his tangible, industrial job than most of his countrymen were to their arbitrary _careers;_ it was the darkest mystery.

Wojciech's eyes rolled around as he elbowed-forward his pallet, past hazard-sticker railings and tinny duct grills. In the Polish boy's mind, how many variables? All sane people are afraid, deep down in their souls. Either stoical like Ernest Hemmingway or completely overwhelmed like Sartre. But the idea of Wojciech's thoughts: to be so eerily confident in confronting the vagaries of other people, that you could hurriedly translate your thoughts into cheap-and-cheerful foreign phrases. Surely the life they led -it was anything but cheap-and-cheerful; it fawned over the most specific horror of all. In terms of manual work, most of the population of modern-day England were a people who indulged in laziness and conceit as surely as they had any thoughts at all. How an outsider could happily fall in with this was something sinister, unknowable.

But also, how the matter seemed to prey solely on him, the maroon-shirted man. To breath the problem to anyone else would raise accusations of lazy political reactionism, when the truth was closer to that Radiohead song, ' _We're not scaremongering, this is really happening...'_

"Good afternoon!", Wojciech was dazzling as he edged his wheels into the breadth of Warehouse One.

"Hello, Wojciech! How are you?"

Ellen Parsons kept her huge shoulders low as she greeted the Polish bluecollar, clipboard barely tilting in her grip as she smiled. The maroon-shirted man simply stared at them for a nerves-protracted heartbeat. Still several paces back, in the bottle-neck between warehouses, his wheels continued to trundle forwards in order to catch the four-thirty carrier. When it came his turn to pass the Finance Manager, he chose not to speak, merely smile. The smile was disingenuous enough; a Wojciech-style greeting would be completely out of the question.

Fear permeated his every conception of Mrs Ellen Parsons' existence. Here was a fifty-something woman with a crooked nose and shoulders so high she was barely an inch removed from being clinically hunchbacked. She wore jewelry and make-up, as if anyone could find her conventionally beautiful. Yet the maroon-shirted man, who was old enough to know that sexual attraction might actually be meaningless, he understood the tragedy. Britain needed forthright women. It needed large women with unsympathetic faces, if only to prove that a beautiful pout was only ever skin deep. Unfortunately, Ellen Parsons was unambiguously evil. The evil shone through in every sinew of her squashed-up face.

"Excuse me? Thankyou!"

She spoke savagely to the maroon-shirted man, and it took him several seconds to understand the meaning. She was implying that he had somehow dangerously barged past her, and should have said, 'Excuse me', and then, 'Thankyou'. This, despite the fact that there was over a metre of clearance between them. Despite the fact that she was a pedestrian in a warehouse complex built entirely for forklifts and trolleys, the work of which allowed for her entire existence. He stared after her. He longed to understand. Perhaps the hatred of him was a subconscious overcompensation, or a shield of some sort against her own bourgeois guilt. After all, sitting behind a desk as a finance manager was easy. She'd no doubt gone to university to train, but this had hardly been an imposition in her life. If ever she departed the company, the other managers could replace her overnight. But if the maroon-shirted man went? They would need to search in a two thousand mile radius to find someone willing to do the same work.

Hence Wojciech and his countrymen.

After dropping off his pallet at the bay, the maroon-shirted man returned to base with a sigh of relief, daily production bonus assured. As he walked, however, he was summoned from around the corner into the Warehouse Manager's office.

"Hello?"

"Come in and close the door", Moe said gravely. The other man did so, and only had to wait a second or two for the bad news. "I'm afraid I can't grant your holiday request".

The underling, he frowned only slightly. "That's OK. My second or third choices will be fine".

The man behind the desk sucked at his mouth, "All the week-long blocks are already broken up. The week you want, Wlodzo from Warehouse B has a half-day holiday on the Thursday. The week _before_ that, Leszek has a half-day holiday on the Wednesday. The week _after_ that, Gabriel has a half-day on the Tuesday. But if you wanted to have a couple of days between them, I can certainly book that in?"

Some part of the maroon-shirted man reflected: there is a modern-day equivalent to the fight-or-flight response that had so preserved prehistoric man. The new choice was simply whether to stand by and meekly accept blatant injustice, or rage and proceed to smash the room with clenched fists.

"Moe, who goes on holiday on a Wednesday and comes back the following Thursday? What holiday lodge would even allow you to book like that? Even if I wanted to, my Dad, in his part-time job from where he's retired -and which pays three times as much as this, by the way- they only allow him to book his holidays in Monday-to-Friday blocks. So I'm supposed to tell him, no holiday for us this year because the weeks we need coincide with some Slovakians needing a morning off to visit their dentists?"

Said the Manager, "We've talked this over before. The no-more-than-two-man rule is there for a reason. It may not be fair, but we need to have a guarantee that we have enough staff here to cover our workload. The-"

"There are forty other men! We both know that we could do without three, four -five, even! The truth behind all this nonsense is that if the company gave us better working conditions, more English people would join and we'd have better output. But it costs less to have slavery-by-another-name, doesn't it? There's none of that moral obligation you'd feel towards your _own people"._

From behind his desk, Moe suddenly became pensive. The man was ex-army, but had seemingly lost any semblance of mess hall them-and-us. "That's a dangerous thing to say".

"Yeah. I know it is. But why? It wouldn't be so bad if anyone anywhere could even tell us _why._ Because it's litigious, because x-y-and-z? Because capitalism works, but it's too embarrassing to acknowledge? Because it's _evil_ , and we want to pretend we're _good_? Or maybe it was a mistake that God gave us all a localised consciousness in the first place, and I should just let some guy in Poland eat my f-ing _soul_ ".

Moe? Wasn't having any of it. "I think you should feel flattered. The Competition Authority are constantly on our backs about the 711 circuit board versus the Incell 4000. You're the only one who knows how to program the CNC to out-fox their audit machines".

The maroon-shirted man was despairing, "To train someone else would be the work of half an hour".

"Look", Moe said brightly, "I can see how upset you are about this-"

"'Upset' doesn't enter in to it. If I can't get single a week away from this place to go fishing with my Dad, I'll go insane".

Moe palmed at his desk, "I know, and if it was up to me-"

"It's common knowledge holiday requests go across _all_ the manager's desks", stated the maroon-shirted man. "There's still such a thing as discretionary approval if they feel human enough. But let me guess -Ellen Parsons. She's the one that turned me down, right?"

"I can't discuss-"

"She was, though, wasn't she?"

When his boss could only cast his eyes guiltily, the other man stormed away to spend the rest of the shift on angry, perfect auto-pilot. Which wasn't to say he wasn't thinking. Self-pity: quite the raised-art at Universal Mainland Electrics.

On leaving the warehouse complex, as the Indian summer sun crept low, he passed a caravan window where a small boy of six or seven was staring out into the lane. The maroon-shirted man regretted not waving to him, even though he was the type of person who generally hated children. He so desperately needed to connect with someone innocent. Someone who hadn't yet been swept up and destroyed in the horror.

More ire was in store, tho. He walked over the crest of Shell Hill to discover large yellow detour signs on the rail bridge, part of the HS1 electrification, requiring him to make a quarter-hour zig-zag out of his way. Involuntary rage squirmed all through his tired mind; the inconvenience caused to the bluecollars of the Industrial Estate, and just to impress the minority of non-working-class train yuppies on their rat-run to the city. And Hell.

Something had to change, surely. Because the alternative was death, and brooding on this as he submitted to the tangled, arbitrary bus route which eventually took him the ten miles home. Parked in dramatically selfish corners of the road, bank-manager-minded white collars waddled inside their countryside hamlets, the conceit invading everywhere, even the deepest corners of pokey English oblivion. Look at the dog-dirt hanging from trees. Look at the sports cars as if they're something other than ostentatious.

How had it become so impractical, though, the idea of self-sufficient towns, or even _partially_ self-sufficient towns? Fifty years ago, anyone born ten miles shy of a city had the option of living a life of primordial, Adam-and-Eve bliss, taking any of the dozen manual jobs that the town or village required. Now the lack of options predated everyone; either work in a shop, Stockholm yourself into believing you're needed in the city, or else fall in with the lowest-of-the-low in what used to be proactive industry.

Truisms all, these ideas ran like train-tracks into his brain, away into a desert of sun-dialing Dali plinths and Roswell-shaped rocks. In a way, he didn't mind. Insanity was coming, and he had no need to preserve his mind in order to bring up children; as a modern man, he thoroughly disbelieved in the afterlife, too, and therefore had no need to excuse God from the mess He'd created. Head leant against the dirty glass, falling asleep, he dreamed like a palmful of sandpaper taken to a cacky red door.

The maroon-shirted man, then: John Myrtlebank, age thirty-five, user of rented accommodation from time immemorial, girlfriend in every town, fan of Rock n' Roll, IQ unreadable whether high or low. There was a time, John fully expected to go to his grave with no particular achievements, aside from making some notoriously stoical girls smile, aside from once winning four thousand pounds in a football bet.

A certain strangeness had entered his life, however. A suggestion in the shadows of some fundamental part of his brain, the idea that he'd been struck by particular bad luck. Maybe it was an exact inversion of the National Lottery, or a spurning more terrible than any doomed love affair.

What Myrtlebank realised: he would soon be the very last working class Englishman, and in a way, it was fine. Laziness, greed, evil. It had always been a safe bet that they'd win. But one question burned mightily, forever. What would his countrymen see if they were actually forced to _look_ athim? What would they see in his face, and how would they understand it?

Going home that night, he blew off a dozen text messages requesting his presence as a Saturday night drinking partner. He stared vacantly at his fifty inch television for answers. Certainly it would fail to guide him to a peaceful night's sleep. The schedule was strange. One channel showed an all-too-somber biography of the artist Jackson Pollock. Another showed a very similar documentary about Hieronymus Bosch. John stared hard for an answer.

In time, he scrambled for a video game controller and, as the tiny proxy figure on screen, climbed to the top of a hill overlooking a densely populated city. With his sniper-sight poised, he scoured around for the city-dweller who most resembled Ellen Parsons, then controlled his breath by holding down R-1. Because of his drunkenness, the bullet still missed her by at least a metre.

But she _knew._ An exclamation mark ghosted all around her ugly head, and she froze in fiercest horror. An aura of panic flashed red, orange, red, indicating her faulty perception of where the bullet had come from. It looked exactly as if she was being attacked by a ghost. Finally she looked directly at him, though he couldn't have been more than a glint on the skyline.

Satisfied that he had at last formulated a plan to understand his arch-enemy, and vice-versa, John Myrtlebank looked on, completely absorbed in the dim-glowing outlines.

AB

His friend Jessica tried desperately to understand, "You need to know if you can score some 'LSD', to put in Ellen Parsons' coffee, so she'll look at you and... what? See what a good person you are, so her conscience finally kicks in?"

"Not exactly. I just want to know what'll happen when she's _forced_ to look at me, think about who I really am that she can treat me so badly. It's eating me up inside".

Jessica's response, "I'm no Tim Leary, but I don't think it works that way. She's as likely to look at the blinds in her office and see them laughing as look up and see the real you".

"At worst, she'll freak out", he shrugged. "At best, she'll look at me, see the last working class man in Britain and get me put on the endangered species list".

Eyes unblinking for such a long time, Jessica considered these ideas like the elements of a dream. Outside, shopping and match-day traffic geared up along the A429, which Myrtlebank endured like a gentle torture. On a Saturday, ordinarily, going to football and forgetting about work were the only things he cared about. If they were together, he and Jessica might go somewhere and stare in awe at the good or bad service of a cafe, or make fun of the newspaper reviews that summarised whole franchises while giving just two or three lines on the actual film in question. Today? It was such a terrible feeling having to plot and scheme.

Laying palms under the arms of her thick jumper, massaging her skinny ribs, Jessica held court. "All I'm saying, if we're going to go through the trouble of going downtown to Corbone Street, why not score some bong-jazz for half the price and just -smoke them troubles away?"

"Your bong isn't the answer this time".

Together they sucked at their beers, Myrtlebank in particular enjoying the subtle-masochistic pain that tinged at his brain with every gulp. He hardly looked at her, though her presence -hella appreciated. It had been a year since she'd left the company, to pursue such honourable enterprises as not-even-a-stock-photo internet bookselling and hockey coaching. Now her lithe figure was practically synonymous with the tatty sofa, an accursed base of operations for a girl who'd once planned on being a police woman, or at least a high-flying executive.

Toying with her jumper, she wondered, "Are things really that bad at the company nowadays?"

"Yes", with quite some bravery, Myrtlebank stated, "It makes Sportiness Direct look like the Garden of Eden".

"I was worried for you, that when the government brought in that Living Wage business, they'd just take away your bonus so you'd still get paid the same after all".

Myrtlebank downed a significant amount of the bottle. "To their credit, they haven't done that. But it's the inefficiency of it all. The vicious circle of them not trusting individuals, and so overregulating us, overstaffing us, not believing we have an unspoken common interest to see the company succeed. The living wage? Things can only be made fairer from the top down. They can contrive new, liberal ideals as much as they want, but there's no getting around it: we're the ones who actually make and do things. If it occurred to us, we could take our work ethic and say, to hell with your cities, to hell with Europe, we're bringing back our _own towns and villages_ ".

The racking full of reconditioned crisp boxes. The half-size statue of a Native American Brave. For a moment, Myrtlebank was completely outside of his environment, only re-emerging to curse himself. It was all so bizarre. Plus, of course, there was no 'We'. Not any anymore, and not for the remainder of the increasingly doomed human race.

"You're being harsh on them".

"Really?", he looked at Jessica dubiously.

"Before I left, it's one of the things I enjoyed, mate. When you'd finish the shift, and you'd get the satisfaction of looking at all the dozens of pallets all lined up waiting to be loaded on the 'artic. You can't explain that satisfaction, can you, unless you're there, _doing it_. You really want them to learn that secret?"

Dry-mouthed, Myrtlebank took his time. There were so many things he could respond with, almost as multitudinous as atoms buzzing across the universe. "We worked in factories our whole lives. When I think of those thousands of pallets we stocked, I imagine, what if that manual labour was converted into building houses? We must've built whole _towns-_ worth of houses. Yet when it comes to one of us buying a house for ourselves? We've only got to save our wages for _a thousand years_!"

Jessica swept out three or four cough sweets from a tube, her chosen alternative for de-stressing since she'd given up smoking. She made no attempt not to slaver; it was enough that she resisted crunching them between her teeth as she spoke. Myrtlebank? Felt only the barest guilt at driving her to her obsessive-compulsion.

"You were just the same when we were kids. I remember, you'd look up at a vapor trail from a plane and say, 'The meteor that killed the dinosaurs probably looked just like that'".

Myrtlebank said nothing, made no particular face.

Continued Jessica, "And remember that day we thought we could hike over to the Severn Estuary to go fishing? You, me and Paul. Totally lost in the middle of nowhere with 30 kilos of gear. It was like we'd been plonked in a foreign country. We saw the horizon and you said, 'All we've got to do is head for the Severn Bridge'. Though it had to be about ten or fifteen miles away. And you know what we were actually heading for?"

Myrtlebank smiled at the memory. It'd been a perfect spring day of medium air-pressure, giving way to two columns of distant white cloud seemingly connected to the ground -and perfectly imitating the pylons of the Severn Bridge.

"That was hardly my fault, was it?"

Glowered Jessica, gently beginning to crunch one of her lozenges, "It was your fault when you said we should just keep walking in that direction anyway. My point is, maybe you should just make the best of things and stop daydreaming. You'll get ahead sooner or later. You've got some kinda genius brain, after all".

Finishing off the bubbles of his beer, "You're as bad as Moe. He said I was a valuable worker just because I knew how to install the right ratio of circuit boards to outfox the CMA. But I hate that stuff more than anything. Why should the government worry about monopolies and cornering the market, when our whole _lives_ are based on an unfair monopoly? All the capital going to people behind desks, people with kids who're encouraged to opt out of manual work from school onwards?"

In the stow-space at the base of the statue was a huge bundle of gaudy-looking cough sweets, seemingly bought at random from a newso. Already, Jessica had started to scrape away the foil of a fresh sleeve.

"How many of those do you eat a day?", asked Myrtlebank in disgust.

"Depends on how stressed I am. Would you prefer it if I started smoking again? Besides, I always buy various brands so Halls don't get a monopoly".

"I thought you only stopped smoking in the first place to impress that girl you were seeing?"

"Also, I don't want to die of cancer. Someone's got to help you with your crazy schemes".

Not really smiling, Myrtlebank nevertheless made a clear, satisfied face. "So you'll help, then?"

"It _is_ a crazy plan, though", breathed the other.

"I don't care if I get caught. I don't care if I die in prison".

"I don't mean crazy as in 'risky', I mean crazy as in an episode of Seinfeld where George finally has a nervous breakdown and asks Kramer to help him pull some voodoo to make his boss spontaneously combust".

A shrug. "I can do it on my own, but let's face it, one guy on his own trying to buy LSD in Corbone Street is going to get ripped off a dozen times before he gets lucky".

The tang of menthol blackcurrant rose steadily from Jessica as she sat back , sliding both forearms along the setee headrest in the reclining pose of a true gangsta-ess.

"Get over here".

They fist-bumped.

"Of course I'll help you. Just do me a favour and stop calling it 'LSD'. Just say, 'Acid'. This is not an episode of Streets of San Francisco from 1972".

AB.

Heavy, colourful illuminations were a big part of the Indian summer in Unity City. The striplights in the underpasses, the huge outlines of the bus-stops, the glowing shop fronts; all seemed to be just as swollen to the humid air itself. Fruit-like reds and yellows, plus so much electrical blue, acted as a guide for the determined Myrtlebank and Jessica. Like something from a Gaspar Noe or Winding Refn film, they were suddenly in sync with such eternal, high-voltage contrast. People laughed and yelled, still somehow modest as their subconscious savoured every last bit of Saturday Night meta. Myrtlebank felt the red streetlight making fine patterns across his gelled hair as they edged into Library Square. Fifty metres removed from the nearest nightclub, the area was still superlative due to being narrowly within eyeshot of _all_ Unity's biggest dance bars. Several different strains of bass, husky or twinkling alternately, created an entirely new type of music in their ear drums.

A shrew-faced boy in a ridiculous puffa waistcoat was sitting on a decorative flower turret, phone in hand but mainly observant of the fluttering nightclubbers.

"Acid?", said Jessica.

"Nah, love", he smiled with business-like calm, "I've only got party pills and tranqs".

"Where do we go for Acid?", Myrtlebank said urgently.

Edgily, "I don't know".

Apparent hopelessness now spurred the pair on, into the bizarre car-park-underpass that jerked through to Weltsbury Road. In the shadows, heavy metal bulwarks were still crazily unprotective of the rollerskate cars parked within, and it was here that a shifty-looking twenty-something was poised.

"Acid?"

"Do I look like a drug-dealer?"

He squared-up to Jessica and twisted his mouth as if to spit. At the savageness, Jessica smirked and waved her arm in a gesture that could mean anything.

Back in the j-peg hues of the Weltsbury Road canyon, they faltered on whether to go left or right, alongside the Buck Rogers blocks or head back out into the urban mass. It was directly outside the Medusa nightclub, though, a particularly lonely area where the owners had set up some linoleum tables for the benefit of people unsure whether to join the queue or simply clubbers who'd come out exhausted. A girl in what looked like a bridesmaid dress sat stiffly, staring straight down at the tiny paving stones. She was gravely drunk. Maybe prematurely drunk; it seemed like it had snuck up and there was a good part of her mind that was still deathly serious, sober.

They saw a German man standing over her, proffering a bottle. "Can I sell you a drink? Sparkling mineral water is the best thing for dehydration. Six pounds".

Myrtlebank removed some notes from his wallet, then interjected, "She seems very dehydrated. She probably needs two".

"What a kind stranger", said the German, and Myrtlebank tried desperately to think of him as something other than an ambitious Nazi lieutenant.

He took the two bottles and gently placed them in front of the shockingly-still girl, "Aren't you worried that hanging round here taking cash, the cops might take you for a drug dealer?"

"I'm _not_ a drug dealer", Germanic surprise bubbled under.

Threatening: "Where do you suppose we could get some acid, Fritz?"

"Acid?", he laughed. "And 'Fritz'? Who is Fritz?"

Except Fritz was in no position to feel indignant. The two moonrakers stared at him. A weird sense predetermination taking everything by storm. Placidly, from Myrtlebank, "Tell us an address".

"Commission Street. The block of flats on the junction. 91b. There is a gentleman there who can help you. But normally his people would give you a password to gain entrance. What you would do without that password... I don't know".

Before they left him, the German man stared at them with some kind of hatred, the sickly bridesmaid briefly looking up as if they might just know the route out of this strangest summer night. The heat played up around their arms, however, and their legs, carrying them down the carriageway gutter, beneath the huge white girders and cramped store-backs.

Said Jessica, "Remember when _we_ came here clubbing? There was that certain lazy DJ who just put on the Utah Saints record and let it play and play. Now they mix up all sorts of hip-hop stuff like they're being street, and that's all that matters".

"You can't stand in the way of progress", said Myrtlebank.

The block of flats on Commission Street was a five story, scraped metal affair, faintly honourable in Myrtlebank's eyes simply because it was _true_ social housing, and if some slags and skanks were allowed to live there through the generations, at least it was a brave acknowledgement of the fickleness of human nature, rather than all unemployed people mysteriously awaiting 'opportunities'. Around the back was a narrow, seedy car park with un-graffitied walls that seemed to scream shadows. The front walkways were equally tight and austere, but they made their way steadily, examining each rank of illuminated intercoms for a laser-printed, '91'.

No light was cast on the grey exterior; just a small yellow haze on the opposite side of the metal-reinforced glass, bringing forth the strangest feeling of being on the wrong side of a fallout shelter. Though there wasn't _too_ much in it. They prepared themselves. Myrtlebank had been hoping; maybe drug-dealers are like any business, trying to streamline operations in favour of customer satisfaction -even if it means pandering.

But then he reflected that this was surely living in the past, and businesses in twenty-first century Britain were no longer so honourable. Now it was a hand-to-mouth nightmare. Balanced against a society that actually _modelled_ itself low inflation, plus layers of business ownership that could simply deny everything, customer dissatisfaction nothing more than slight collateral damage. After all, if there was one guarantee to be had in the dense scatter of overpopulation, there would _always_ be un-discerning customers to fill-out anyone who left. Or rather, likely the End of the World would come before a mass uprising.

"Hello?"

" _Hello_ ", came the response from brittle little speakers.

"We've been sent here by a mutual friend", Myrtlebank made this up quite spontaneously. "I believe you have tropical fish for sale".

The voice neither indulged or drove them off. " _I can see you through my little camera. You don't look like you've got anything to transport any tropical fish, mate_ ".

Said Jessica, "It's OK if you want to put them in little bags like you used to get at the fun fair".

The voice on the intercom thought about this, " _Nah, that was always a bit dodgy wasn't it? What if the bag started leaking before you got home? What if you fell over_?"

Jessica pointed out, "Couldn't be much of a life for a Goldfish anyway, getting hauled around with a load of didicotes".

 _"That's offensive, love. My dad used to work in a fun fair"._

Scanning around for wherever the hidden camera might be, Jessica said vaguely, "Sorry".

 _"That's OK. I'm just messing with you. But I can't let you up here with my prize She Bunkins just like that. Some of them are worth thousands. For all I know, you could be robbers, or worse. I need you to go and see my mate on Johnson Street. Fella in the Iron Empire cap. If he likes the look of you, he can send you back here and_ then _we'll talk"._

"Isn't that a bit long-winded?", Myrtlebank started. "We're here now".

" _My fish, my rules",_ the intercom went silent and didn't re-activate.

"God almighty", Myrtlebank swished his hands in his pockets as they loafed back to the primary lights of Unity party district. "I just wanted to meet a simple drug dealer, not Karla from Smiley's People".

"It makes sense; they're just insulating themselves", Jessica shrugged.

Back through the narrow underpass, the yellow street lights powered overhead like a dull, bronze dawn. For the first time, Myrtlebank noticed that one of the newsos was still open, at an hour approaching midnight, and this he found surreal beyond words, _exactly_ like something from a dream. Around the varnished pic-nic benches were streetlights, amazingly sharp and as perfectly contrasting as daylight, if a thousand times more hypnotic.

The medium-ostentatious architecture of the overpasses would've cast deep-shadow angles in the daylight; now they were edges of fuzzy-orange. It was strange how Myrtlebank felt himself phasing out, almost like a regular day at work with achingly tired emotions that dimmed as a result to pressure. They reached Johnson street, found no cap-wearing representative, and merely felt nothing.

"Let's sit a while", said Myrtlebank, increasingly the Ahab figure.

Jessica wondered, "What if the cops come?"

"I feel like I could confess to everything, and they'd just have to accept it like it was a speech by Khrushchev in 1962".

In time, a young man with a deeply thoughtful face sidled around the corner, but missing an Iron Empire cap. And why on Earth did idiots waste their time complaining about the lower classes getting fat on fast food, when their restaurants always offered such tiny portions?

The man's chip-eating became staggered as he saw the newcomers, Myrtlebank taking it as a split second chance to say, "Hello Bobby. We were just about to go and see the latest Iron Empire film. Is it any good?"

"Do I know you?"

"We had word from your friend at the Commission Street flats. Why aren't you wearing your Iron Empire cap?"

Uneasily, "I was playing with my dog before I came out. There was something upsetting him so I let him keep it. To comfort him, like".

It was Jessica who was shrewd now, "Just so we're sure who everyone is, what number does your business partner live at?"

"Ninety-One-A", the assistant dealer was only partially defensive.

"Is there anything you'd like to ask _us?"_

"I don't need to ask you any questions, love. I only need to know what you want and if you've got the money to pay for it".

"Acid", said Myrtlebank boldly.

"'Acid' as in...?"

"Lysergic diethylamide".

"200 a cap".

All three of them turned their heads from side to side as the classic choreography of a drug deal struck up, Myrtlebank removing the wad of notes from his wallet, the recipient getting ready to pull them in through a nervous, winsome slide.

"Get back to the flat, then. Tell my man, 'Have you seen my dog? I think he's run away'".

Myrtlebank turned to talk to Jessica, as if the dealer wasn't there. "I'll make a move, Jess. You stay here with our friend. I'll call you when I've got the tab in my hand".

The dealer was aghast. He flicked up his hands -and if he'd been a politician on Question Time, he would have looked unusually confident. "You two are weird. You think we're not going to deliver? Acid and all that hallucinogenic stuff is old fashioned nowadays. No one wants them. You're doing us a favour buying them, and never mind that we might rip you off".

Myrtlebank addressed him, "I don't think you might rip us off. I think, in this life, _everyone_ is ripping _everyone_ off, and as a society, we wouldn't know proper equity if it ran up and bit us on the behind".

Jessica swiveled slightly, said urgently, "John, it occurred to me, I should be the one to pick the stuff up. If it goes south with Ellen, the cops might get forensic on everyone; you should be seen handling it as little as possible".

Years ago, when she was coming out with her sexuality, Myrtlebank had been witness to Jessica giving-as-good-as-she-got with a six foot warehouse bully who thought lesbians were bizarre, hate-worthy monsters. He had no doubt that she could look after herself even in the heart of a drug dealer's flat, surrounded by junkies, surrounded by evil, whatever. But the world was poised so delicately, so insidiously; no variable could be trusted.

"You're doing enough. This is my situation alone".

"But I like to keep my hand in, with this working class showdown thing".

It clicked with him that she was already starting to backstep away.

"Jessica!"

Meanwhile, complained the street man, "This is crazy! You really think that, now I've got the cash from your single poxy deal, I'm just going to vanish off the face of the Earth?"

Myrtlebank turned to face him, "Frankly, yes".

AB

Now, on a second visit, the Commission Street flats seemed totally different. As a wonderful and nuanced thing, it was possibly only the human brain detecting the subtle shifts in the night sky as it edged towards dawn. Jessica thought, it couldn't be adrenaline, anyway. She felt curiously calm and measured.

The buzzer depressed, a reply came rapturously fast.

"I'm back again. Have you seen my dog? I think he's run away".

And it was as simple as that. The door made exactly the same buzz as when the intercom was activated, only now unbolting the latch to a heavily depressurized sound. Welcome to the strange sensation of climbing stairs alongside motionless rooms; not-quite-homely people silently wiling away the night like Schrodinger's Cat. For Jessica, the silence and the dirt-resistant bannisters struck a surreal note; somewhere as momentous as a drug dealer's anterooms should be full of echoes. Instead there was only a highly polished silence. In a flash, the protocol of actually stepping inside his room was equally alien, and she had no choice but to walk straight in. Convincing herself to be nervous or afraid was an evolutionary cul-de-sac, for sure.

Besides, the notice on the door -apparently liberated from some real industrial site- was truly a spur for complete bravery.

DANGER! PROHIBITED AREA. ENTRY WILL NOT ONLY BRING DEATH BUT WILL ALSO CAUSE SEVERE AGONY AS DEATH OCCURS.

Fine, thought Jessica, though such a notice could equally apply to the world itself.

Moving gently, however, nothing more surreal than armchairs and a TV in a funny left-hand positionwas enough to make her feel disorientated. One of the seats contained the figure of the drug dealer, and she stared at him almost-almost calmly.

Here was an interesting figure. Given enough effort, his body could've been whipped into shape, but his doughy face was overweight beyond all help of a diet. Super-heavy lids and eyesockets, complete with sleep-starved bags, sat above a huge Oliver Hardy nose and whoopie cushion lips. And yet the spark in his eye; knowingly-friendly and self-absorbed enough to be a sheer masterpiece of consciousness.

"Come and sit down for five minutes while I get your gear. I like to get to know my customers. It's pretty scary being up in the middle of the night, isn't it?"

She heard him, but it hardly registered that she should obey. On the TV, she saw, was a latter-day episode of The Simpsons. It was the one where Mr Burns was filling out his last will and testament, before abruptly daydreaming about riding an animated dinosaur. He climbed on his lawyer's back and rode around, before Homer entered and screamed, 'Argh! A dinosaur!'

From a strained hidey-hole in another room, the dealer called back, "What happened to your boyfriend? If you don't mind me being nosey. I'm a nosey man, actually".

"He's not my boyfriend, we're just friends".

"Does _he_ know that?"

She caught her breath while still allowing her outraged thoughts to run free, "We've known each other all our lives. Being boyfriend and girlfriend is the _least_ way we could be intimate together".

"Wow", said the drug-dealer, returning with what looked unhealthily like a box of fishing bait.

Riding high on her incredulity, "Since you like us having a conversation so much, mate, I've got a question for you: dosage. The person I'm getting this for is three times my size, twice as old. Will one tab be enough to get her high? How long will it take to start working?"

The strangest thing; now and then, an overwhelming sense of innocence swept over the dealer's face. He licked his lips and smiled, "This what I'm going to give you? It'll take about ten minutes to start. And I don't think different sized people need different doses. I could be wrong. Who are you going to give it to?"

Dark orange walls with big, gloss-white doors, serving hatches, kick-planks. The Pulp Fiction poster was present, but stuck on the wall in such a way that it looked like an entirely new image. Jessica looked fleetingly at her surroundings as she wondered how best to deflect the question. At her shins, beneath the huge coffee table, thick magazines were squared up in an almighty pile. As well as issues of Playstation UK and Custom Car, there were lots of copies of Sight and Sound. _Beautiful, high-brow_ Sight and Sound, a magazine she'd always been strangely in love with. All the features were written as if on a loving whim, and could make the most obscure and pretentious films seem like accessible mainstream. And then there were the reviews. Each one had a side-bar synopsis of the plot, from start to finish, and this she found perfectly magical, transcendental. It suggested that the contrived conclusions of a beginning, middle or end really weren't important at all, and rather the meaning of life could simply be found in ...friction. The sensation of random bits of fate colliding together.

"I can't tell you what we're doing with it. But it's something important".

Sometimes the dealer looked dour-to-the-point-of-malevolence, but for now his innocent enthusiasm shone on. Even his greasy hair, as he leant forward, looked curiously noble. Merely Julius Caesar having let himself go.

Now blinking excitedly, now smiling like a baby. In all, it seemed Jessica was being invited into a world where truth trumped everything. He was smiling at his own fatness, smiling at the ridiculousness of being a drug dealer.

"I think you might tell me, on account of this being a special occasion".

"What's that?"

"This is actually my last ever drug deal. I mean, I've still got some pill jars with benzos in, but it might be just as good to throw them in the river as try to sell them".

"So what?", wondered Jessica. "You've made enough drugs-cash to retire?"

"Not exactly", he beamed in that perfectly ugly, perfectly warm-hearted way of his. "My little brother's band is about to go on tour. I've got the gig as their sound engineer, and I'm going to make sure all their stuff gets uploaded to the internet OK".

"What's the name of band? Maybe I've heard of them?" -this was just about possible.

"The Holy Equilibrium".

Jessica thought about the name, then said, "Sounds like a religious cult".

"I suppose it does. But they're really good, honestly. When he was a teenager, he always used to say, 'One day I'm going to be frontman in the most -y'know, _prolific_ \- band in England'. And I laughed at him, and thought, 'Oh yeah'. But then, he also used to say that his band would never do gigs or release any EPs until he'd already written enough tracks that were worthy of being chart singles in a forty year career. That way there'd be no doubt".

"Wow", said Jessica. "And do you think it'll work?"

"He keeps all the riffs and chord-structures on a laptop only he's got the password for. But I've heard some of it. It's really good. Some of the songs are like New Order or The Doves. Y'know, just -punchy. Others are like Massive Attack".

Jessica stared at the purple void between the coffee table and the thin curtains. She tried not lean forward as if the matter was all-important. "There's just one problem with that. People's tastes today are so s-. It's not just Simon Cowell stuff. Even singer-songwriters can only get recognition for being banjo-whiney or shrill like Florence and the Machine or Adele".

Grinned the dealer, "Maybe we'll be the ones to cure it all".

In any case, 'The Holy Equilibrium' was a name both emblazoned on and carefully filed away in her brain. Maybe they'd succeed. And maybe this wasn't the strangest drug dealer in Britain. As a partial defence against getting swept up in his pudgy, enthusiastic face, she scanned her eyes around the edges of the small flat. No dirt. Barely any dust. At the very least, she would have expected the odour of late-night convenience snacks to have become absorbed into the walls. As it was, only the smell of fresh-electrical-products could be caught lurking, and drug-money-for-gadgets; like a less conceited version of any house in Britain.

She sensed he was still staring at her, but smiling not-quite-so-hard. "So, are you going to tell me what you want this for?"

"I already gave your man the money", she pointed out. "It's not your business to ask".

"You don't think I'm a good person, with a conscience? I don't know much about LSD, but I know it can mess people up. I know that if you need to buy more after this, you'll have to go to someone a lot more dangerous than me".

A not-quite-genuine smile from the girl, "We're having this really deep conversation, and I don't even know your name".

"Robert".

"Jessica".

They shook hands.

"Robert, I can tell you, mate, this isn't the first time I've bought street drugs, but it _will_ be the last. And when I say I need it for something important, I really do. It's something -moral".

He tried to understand, "Are you some kinda communal artist, then? Something like that? Or -let me guess, the PA of a big-time novel-writer?"

"Robert, please. Will you just give me the acid?"

Neither good or evil, just studious, "But if it's that moral, you should be proud of it".

Back at the factory, if there was one thing Jessica had been famous for, it was her efficient telephone manner, the ability to think on her feet when relaying the most complex information to other departments. Even the managers would pretend not to have heard the ringing, so that she'd be the one to answer, often finessing the facts to their favour in the most devious way. Now? Suddenly? She found it was a skill she had not lost. She stared down at the spines of Sight and Sound.

"Did you ever see the film 'Altered States'?"

"Don't think so", he said, genuinely scouring his memory.

"It was about a university research project that gave a man hallucinogenic drugs and put him in a sensory deprivation tank. I think it had the dad from Lost in Space playing the lead character. The idea was, back when man was just the simplest kind of animal, he had a closer connection with -God, ultimate reality, call it what you like. They thought, we all must have primal memories of this locked up in our collective unconscious, always there in the DNA of our brains. We just had to have the trappings of modern life taken away.

"Well, what a lot of people don't know, the movie was based on real research and real theories. My university is very close to a breakthrough. We have a test subject who's just so -highly poised".

To her horror, he'd taken out his laptop and was looking up 'Altered States research project'. Luckily, he saw nothing that immediately negated her story, and indeed it was only a half-hearted search anyway. He looked into her eyes and beamed, "That's amazing!"

Breathed Jessica, "In a way, it's amazing. But in another way... don't you ever get that thing when you're drifting off to sleep, and you're almost under, but then your limbs suddenly go, 'yoink!', like you're falling? That's a genetic memory of when we were all monkeys, sleeping in trees".

"I _do_ get that! All the time!", he said delightedly.

"Not to mention that dream everyone gets when they're kids. Crawling through a cave that's barely big enough for their body; a genetic memory of first being born".

Laughter. He closed the laptop in order to grant her his full attention. "So, what is it your research team is actually looking for?"

Just the lie itself, she found -inflated her lungs to keep talking. "We think we may have found a way of plotting when miracles will happen".

 _"Miracles_? Wow! So -if your man in the flotation tank thinks of something, it happens?"

Gingerly backtracking, she leant ever-forward on the weirdly clean sofa so as to not seem victorious in a lie. She avoided gesturing, letting the fuzzy orange light blur the air between them. "It's more complicated than that. We're also working with a team of historical statisticians. When our test subject is lucid -she talks of all the great prophets and religious devotees who came before. She's got this crazy scholarly knowledge of, like, the days of Moses, Jesus, Joan of Arc. They all arose to combat these specific social injustices. Almost as if the revealing of deeper religious truths was a secondary thing. Moses defeated the Pharisees. Jesus, the Roman Empire. Joan of Arc, the English. The next miracle will happen, she said, to defeat capitalism. We just need to know when. There's certain theories that just her brain entering this certain hypnogogic bandwidth might soon trigger the miracle to start".

The victim of her lie frowned, almost to the point of throwing off his initial fascination. "But that doesn't make sense. If miracles always happen to stop people being persecuted -why didn't someone come along to save the Jews from the Nazis?"

Well. There was thinking on your feet, and then there was thinking on your feet on a thin ledge above a precipice. Staring headlong into the murderous abyss, because it was somehow more convincing than making eye-contact. "It's all to do with the ratios. Or at least, that's what she said. The Nazis ruled through fear, and there were whole continents that were willing to stop them. There has to be a certain ratio of hopelessness in the collective unconscious. Who is there to stop capitalism nowadays? Or to put it another way, who would ever vote _not_ to have more and work less? Intervention has to come, mate. Whether it's divine, or whether it's all our unconscious minds just conjuring up something that _seems_ divine ...who knows".

"That's amazing", he repeated.

Wholesale acceptance, Jessica found oppressive enough. The torrent of questions that came next, however, felt like running some kind of hell-gauntlet; 'Which religion is actually true, then?', 'When you get deja-vu, is that part of it?', 'Will the new prophet do anything to convince all the hipster atheists on the internet, or will they just _know_?'

Maybe she could convince herself it was something like writing a novel, but with someone's life, and for the best of intentions. The idea that it might all be poetic justice, making a disciple out of an ex drug dealer who _himself_ had previously led people to oblivion. It fluttered through her mind like a butterfly, then disappeared.

She watched, and tried to detach herself, as he wrapped a single-foil blister in layer after layer of sandwich bag. His eyes were sometimes vaguely excited, sometimes reverent, most of all making her wish the dawn would show through the thick curtains, just to give a psychic full-stop.

She prepared to leave, moving stiffly to the deep-beige shadows of the front door.

"Well? When are you going to give it to her? When does she go into the flotation tank?"

Jessica, for some reason, started to make a genuine calculation about when Myrtlebank would go into Ellen's office and administer the drug. It would be the beginning of tomorrow's night shift, probably.

"Around ten fifteen at night".

Robert hurriedly braced a scrap of paper on the wall and wrote down his phone number. As a sign of good faith, she did likewise.

Said the former drug dealer, "Will you call me and tell me what happens?"

"I will".

Again, the thing with her breath, words controlled by a deep chasm just brimming with desperation.

AB

Having freshly installed digital in the ancient Ford, the availability of decent music was incredible -even if you had to keep tuning from station to station. They listened to Beck, Sheryl Crowe, James Brown, as if they were the preternaturally good filler tracks in the album of life itself. On 6 Music, they had a song by The Doors, accompanied by the very next spoken-word interlude that had originally followed it on the LP.

In the intervening silence, Myrtlebank took a deep breath and started to do an impression of the late Terry Wogan, "You knnnoow, when I was back there in seminary school, there was a person there who put forth the proposition that you can petition the Lord with prayer-"

To Jessica's amusement, on the radio, Jim Morrison started to give exactly the same statement, tho in as different a voice as she could imagine.

Puffing himself up, Myrtlebank boomed his incredulous voice -in the manner of some kindly pinstripe impressing something to an underling, possibly in a nineteen-fifties railway sub-office, " _You cannot petition the Lord with prayer, my boy!"_

As meanwhile, Morrison screamed the same words but at the top of his lungs.

Temporarily, she was blinded, lost in the zen of a perfect belly-laugh. From second to second, she couldn't remember when her eyes had started to burn, or how long her lungs had been unable to hitch a breath because of the laughter. The car swerved dangerously into the oncoming lane. She struggled for control, taking it for granted there were no other cars about, that she'd survived and was not merely a hilarious ghost.

"You idiot!"

Said Myrtlebank, "It's not that funny!"

"Yes it is!"

She hastily pulled up in the cedar-lined inlet, the anonymous business park where they made and achieved ...nothing.

Aftershock number one came as a normal laugh. Then, infrequently, aftershocks two and three came as sharp little inhalations. Finally, she was sober. "We should probably walk the rest of the way".

Stepping clear, the setting sun blasted them. Myrtlebank put on his trademark aviators, sunglasses she would have killed for if only she had the bone structure. Like someone unsure whether the hiccups are over, she wondered if she'd truly finished laughing at his impression. In time, however, there was an understanding of the deeper truth: at least part of the hilarity lay in the release of nervous energy, that Myrtlebank was calm enough to crack jokes even with the weird, dark task that lay in front of him.

Warned Jessica's mind, sure, it was the strangest bit of cockamamie _she'd_ ever known. At the same time, it was an obvious threshold and something which had to be done. Right, setting sun? Visions came of prehistoric sun-worshippers sauntering along with their colourful head-dresses at a jaunty angle. The thought that they might one day be human sacrifices of their own society was strangely quantifiable and easy to live with. The sun-god might be many things, but at least he wasn't capricious like humans. Plus, of course, the eclipse would blind everyone, the Incas who did the sacrifices and the Inca atheist hipsters alike.

Down onto Hucklebury Lane they strolled, with the clear sensation of some philosophically-eerie trip into the past. How many years had she walked backwards and forwards this way when _she'd_ worked for the company? Sisyphus had felt deeply embarrassed for her. She fleetingly remembered the bad times, the not-so-bad times, the sorrow-is-the-only-truth times.

It was like a Werner Herzog or Errol Morris documentary. Some stone-face victim revisiting the scene of a trauma, explaining to the wistful old interviewer the bizarre nature of their sorrow. Ergo. Some time ago, a girl with a crewcut and checked shirt had caught her eye a couple of metres in front. She'd been walking to work as Jessica had been walking home. Through a number of meetings, they got to be friendly through time-of-day-pleasantries alone, never to the point of learning each other's names, but what did that matter? Amazing is as amazing does. It was amazing enough that Jessica had the courage to talk to someone so beautiful after what happened with Vivasha. It was amazing that she had energy to talk at all after a 12 hour nightshift. Naturally, the possibility of the girl being the same sexual orientation as her was a crazy dream. She fully expected there'd never be the slightest evidence for anything other than a Hucklebury Lane daydream romance.

Except for that certain cue, _'I'm excited for today; I ordered Aliens on Blu-ray and it should be coming through the letter box right now. If there's one thing that gives me courage for dealing with all the crap thirty-something girls like us have to deal with, it's Ripley driving a tank into a warzone to save some marines'._

Jessica stared at her, almost sharply, resolved to build up the courage to ask for a date the very next time they met.

What happened. The next day, heart-in-mouth, she'd waited at her work bench quite patiently, ala the appeasement of Ellen Parsons' hunchbacked zeal that none of the workers should even _seem_ to be loitering. On the next bench along, Myrtlebank had hung on his heels, mysteriously twitchy, a man barely conscious but at the same time wonderfully blameless. Jessica remembered well the panic; looking down at her elegant little Accurist in such a way that she started to hate the sight of it. In her mind, there was practically an astral projection; out there on the lane, the crewcutted girl walking along without her.

'The end-of-shift siren is out of sync', multiple people stated. Not just by a few seconds, by whole minutes. As a certainty, people started to curse. As a certainty, people threatened to simply walk out. As a certainty -no one had the courage to actually do so.

Finally the siren sounded, a massive five minutes later than usual. Jessica speed-stepped through the offices, then openly ran to the main gate, across the rail bridge.

But of course, the crewcutted girl was long passed.

The next shift, every man and his dog from every department complained. Making excuses for Mrs Ellen Parsons' tyranny, Moe explained how it was a mechanical fault in the CPU of the tannoy system itself; there was no way of repairing it until they could call out the manufacturer's rep. Yet surely this was a top priority, demanded the workers -not least the people who missed their trains and busses. Granted, it _was_ a priority, said Moe, but it still had to be done in a cost-effective way.

The same thing happened the next shift, stirring in Jessica the sensation of her whole life slipping away. It seemed a matter of prescience rather than fear, the sensation she'd never again get out of work in time to see the crewcut girl. For sure, she could no longer sit by in dumbass tension. With a jar of coffee and the internet in front of her, she began some serious research. Obviously, the first port of call was the government's own employment law web-pages, badly organised and non-plain-English though they were. After all, it was impossible to imagine that, in the sprawling history of worker relations, the problem of employers randomly shifting the goalposts of when their staff started and finished work hadn't been legislated against in the _nineteenth century._ However, there was no specific reference, and her dusted-off contract was equally vague. She looked on the Citizens Advice Website. Just like the government's; not the slightest mention of an obligation to have clearly-delineated start work / finish work times, no matter the permutation of words and syntax you might use to search for it. In desperation, she rang ACAZ, the sinister government-funded-yet-for-profit worker conciliation company. At least, she thought, the premium rate cheesedick would be able to give her a definitive answer about whether or not any legislation even _existed._

And, of course, he could not. Apparently an expert in employment disputes, he still had no idea one way or the other.

Tension mounting, she made what she suspected to be the most desperate, last-ditch effort of all. She visited her local MP during one of his advice surgeries. Jonah Grade, the most cliché-posh Tory minister in the most cliché-posh constituency in Britain. If there was one slim reason for hope it was that he was serving out his last term of office before retirement; presumably even a conceited Tory would want to achieve _something_ for the working class to remember him by. And really, what are MPs even there for apart from kicking down bureaucratic doors?

To her surprise, his giant forehead rippled in genuine interest, showed real empathy, saying, 'I think we should draft an email together to my colleague in the cabinet, Daintee Dakkah, the Minister for Work and Pensions. First of all, I think it's very poor that ACAZ couldn't give you a clear answer one way or another. Would you like to make a formal complaint against them?'

Haunted by a lack of sleep, her brain had tick-tocked, eventually deciding that it was truly a sign of the End Times when even the basic human desire for vengeance against injustice is subsumed by a tortured hope the injustice will just _vanish._ She would allow ACAZ to continue their vampire existence.

The end paragraph of the email written by Tory MP Jonah Grade, then, _'Outside of a set contract, there appears to be no obligation in law for a company to adhere to its stated start work / finish work times, only an obligation to pay the employee for the number of hours worked. While my Constituent and I both agree that a government should not involve itself in sovereign business practice, this seems like such basic aspect of employment that we should welcome a suggestion about how things can change in the future'._

Versus the return email from Daintee Dakkah MP, which popped into Jessica's inbox three days later, ' _There is no obligation in law for a company to adhere to its stated start work / finish work times, only an obligation to pay the employee for the number of hours worked. It is inappropriate for a government to involve itself in sovereign business practice, and this position unfortunately cannot change in the future'._

If someone was writing a satirical political novel, it would have seemed like an indictment far too lazily sketched, like writing about some Tory MPs who'd started to grow horns. She idly wondered whether she should write to Daintee Dakkah's shadow counterpart, since maybe the recent ultra-leftwing turnaround might be braver. Except, no. The other side was equally in the business of appeasing the status quo, only in their case, solely the world of refugee-loving, allotment-owning, cycle-path-using hippies.

She remembered sitting bleakly at her laptop, lost in how the Internet is not really the liberating fount of humanity that people claim. The world of those search results -cold, un obliging of any kind of localised consciousness. At the same time...

She remembered hearing news reports about people citing obscure bits of European law and having an outraged precedent set in their native countries. Like a geek. Wondering into Ikea in the hope of finding a rare comic. She visited the European Law Website.

The layout -incredibly dense with laws, charters and sub-charters- was nonetheless weirdly easy to scan through, just like those reports of grey aliens able to psychically communicate through pleasant English, even if the truth was forever unknowable as they performed their unpleasant sexual tests. Would that there was a labyrinth of jargonny text to at least give her the satisfaction of _mining_ , _discovering_ something.

But the reality of the whole enterprise could be seen, clear as day. Shamelessly pedantic laws had been created to pander to the specific conceits of member countries. The exaggerated faux-libertarianism of the French. The childish dispassion seen in the Nordic states. The eerie, well-bred subservience of the Visegrads. Most of all, that arcane knowledge of the Germans, that if you had a work ethic and you applied it to industry, you could thenachieve _anything._ Including having a pet stooge that you could lie to, take advantage of. Let the English believe that they can now subsist on being an economy of middle-managerial office workers -as if that somehow equates to an active economy. Let their decadent housewives consume our European goods and services, for just as long as they can. Let them pay their dues to the mafia, and then starve, just like Greece -and if David Icke gives a deliberately sinister account of some totalitarian World Government, it's only because the schizophrenic truth is bleaker still.

Sometimes from Hucklebury Lane, you could just-about observe the ocean at Nestorling Sands. Beyond that, somewhere in the far-distant haze, there was probably only a hundred-foot Devil, ankle-deep, laughing and pointing; and look at England, that doesn't even own the fishing rights a metre out from its own shores. In any case, Jessica couldn't help but stare hauntedly.

 _'I don't care if I get caught. I don't care if I die in prison',_ said Myrtlebank. As they walked, the downwards-creeping sun made a game out of their shadows, making them look half-vanished, making their necks look violently broken.

Myrtlebank moved in a jog now, his narrow spine curved in fierce tension. Jessica followed suit, all the way down to the long security fence of Universal Mainland Electrics.

"Give me your phone", he commanded her.

She saw that he was somehow synching-up her video-streaming program to display everything seen through the lens of his own camera.

"I'm going to sneak in before my shift and hide it in her office. Better to record everything wholesale; I don't know exactly when I'll get to go in there. My phone is only streaming, though. Whatever happens will be recorded only on yours. What I've done, I've doctored some Selcuriex manifests to give me an excuse to go in there. It'll look like their welching on our shipping contracts, by a pound or two. She'll be annoyed but not out-and-out angry".

Jessica nodded meekly. Knowledge of life and fatalism meant that she didn't need to ask what would happen if Ellen found out the manifests were doctored. She didn't need to ask what would happen if Ellen had a bad trip and suffered a heart attack, or went insane and clawed out some vital artery. It would be a terrible thing, inverted commas or not, but by then, neither of them would be human any more, so it wouldn't matter. The great thresholds of inhumanity lurked like spiked pillars; laziness and submission to laziness, slowly rotating and crushing the life from everything.

Maersk lock-ups and baled scrap gave an intimacy to the giant yard. Deceptively basic outlines had always hidden the truth of Universal Mainland Electrics, that the place had a strange multitude of tight walkways and closely-packed closets. Before she knew what had happened, Myrtlebank had vaulted the pedestrian gate and was heading across to one of the smaller, more reclusive access doors.

Childish, she knew, to regret being unable to say goodbye and good luck. Under the circumstances, it was probably the last thing he needed to be distracted by, the poignancy of a lifelong friendship. But all the same, in this dark and emotionless life?

She watched him shoulder open a stubborn security door, gaunt and emaciated muzzle forming into a ratlike grimace as he disappeared into the recesses. It occurred to her to look at the action being streamed on her phone. Ah, but in this dark and emotionless life? A perfect, lifelong relationship is worth everything; Myrtlebank's way of acknowledging her continued presence was to take out a piece of chalk and write on an anonymous wall, 'GEORGE AND KRAMER'S LAST MISSION'.

She sat back against the wire fence, then, heart glowing.

Inside the plant, plenty of his Polish and Slovakian co-workers smiled and wished Myrtlebank good evening. A couple walked past oblivious, lost in their pre-shift chores. A few blanked him because they were inherently surly to anyone who wasn't Lord of the Manor. Strangely, the light at the edge of Jessica's screen hardly dimmed as he passed from chamber to chamber, bringing ideas of some great, unblinking eye set in the ceiling, from a computer game, from a TV studio, from Athena's House-of-Mirrors on Mount Olympus.

Her man arced and slowed up in his strides, just a bit, staring hard along the partitions to make sure there were no oncoming white-collars. Black ops go, he slipped inside and hid his phone, camera lens facing outwards. He must've judged it to be medium-to-well hidden, as far as Jessica could tell, behind some payroll trunks and the box of a motorised stapler. In any case -he vanished about his duties.

Ellen arrived. The shift started. From Jessica's perspective there was a narrow view of her computer screen, and she watched as the familiar managerial screens swept by. Requests for credit checks were made. The financial balance sheets of their various departments. It was around ten minutes in that she brought up what looked like a holidays website, or in any case, something that featured palm trees and beautiful people laughing. Much time passed, involving trips to equally gaudy and non-work-related websites.

Thought Jessica, as happens in every upper-management office in Britain, as surely as the sun rises. As surely as an invisible, sceptre-holding, goat-headed Satan sits in a pentagram in their souls -yuppies skive.

By now it was night. She drew up her legs and blindly withdrew a handful of cough sweets from the foil. Painful though it was to watch the ugly woman on her Satanic throne, she couldn't really look away for fear of missing Myrtlebank's arrival. What was happening in the lane beyond her drawn-up shins was strangely subdued, anyway. It was dim. But a grainy, speckled hue in the grey atmos made it impossible to guess exactly what _time_ it was, how long ago the sun fell, how long it would be until the pre-dawn stirrings. There were no dog-walkers, or druggies, or slag children, and she couldn't understand why.

In the other direction was the long ridge which eventually merged into the rail-line footbridge. Beyond the highpoint of overgrown hedges, she could see, not the rail line itself, but the weird access gantries which were level with the overhead signals.

It was all so lonely. Except for one point, when she looked up from Ellen's unashamed skiving, to see a solemn-faced man in a grey baseball cap staring strangely at the railtrack beneath. He was over a hundred metres away and, in his own way, just forlorn as she was apparently.

Jessica uttered, 'Oh no', under her breath, before she'd even properly processed what was happening. He was obviously waiting for a train to pass underneath so he could commit suicide.

Her mind gulped; there was no way of knowing what to do, still less of understanding the cosmic philosophy.

On Ellen's screen, the photo of some fat women doing a five mile sponsored walk for a military charity.

Jessica hesitated, deathly scared of moving out of range of Myrtlebank's transmissions, of upsetting things in any way. Of course he'd want her to run around the corner and talk the suicidal man down. In his mind, there'd be nothing more important than saving a random, grey-capped depressive, of that much she was certain. In his _mind_.

But in his soul? Because of this witch's capitalism, they'd suffered so much. In their souls, in the next incarnation where _everyone_ would arrive all damaged and guilty, it was not so much of a clear-cut decision. Jessica had always been fascinated by the low currency of people's lives. And truly it was just _their_ lives singular. You often heard of people becoming depressed through some family crisis and committing suicide. But the final desire to change things so dramatically -why did it automatically bypass trying to start a new standard of social sensitivity, and go straight to suicide?

Of the two of them, Myrtlebank had been the fan of reality-explaining UTEs, but Jessica had been interested enough to listen to the best theories. The ones to do with the gravimetric curvature of the universe. The ones that cited parallel universes and people's consciousness as holographic projectors. At the time, Jessica couldn't really picture either of them well enough to see them as true. But increasingly, on days like this -the ability to think was an aberration. It was something built to fail. Quantum physics, the controller of the universe itself, spoke of everything being weighed in the balance and seeking conscious consent in order to carry on existing. Everything except our singular, macrocosmic conceit. Everything except capitalism.

She scowled mightily and laid the phone aside. Swiveled her eyes-

To see the man in the grey cap priming a spray can and graffiting a huge penis on the railway hoardings. Which was not why she gasped.

In the office, a cowboy-staring Myrtlebank was handing Ellen Parsons a sizeable mound of A4 docking sheets. What happened next happened in a beat; she turned around to reach some carbon copies from a box folder, with the other moving quickfire to drop the acid tab in her coffee. As she turned back, her face was horribly numb, except for the most stupid hatred, trademarked. For Myrtlebank, his eerie smile was -steady. A plank from a shipwreck moving steadily on the calmest ocean current in history. Maybe sharks would come, but in the meantime, everything about him was tranquil. Killing time as he lazily explained the supposed shipping errors that so made a joke of their company.

Much time passed. Their conversation was dull and bureaucratic, also lacking in concentration on Ellen's part. Hatred was a collapsing building encompassing her soul. Yet for all the unpleasantness and the boredom, there was always something interesting for Jessica to fix her attention on within the tiny office space. The great, solid clock ticked steadily, brother of the Roswell Autopsy diorama. Myrtlebank's hand moved on the tabletop as he spoke, Steve McQueen's damndest to steal Yul Brynner's scene. Or Steve McQueen trying to steal a scene if he'd been forced to take second billing in a film starring the Anti-Christ herself.

Ellen's body ticked slightly.

 _'You wear guilt, like shackles on your feet. Like a halo in reverse. I can feel the discomfort in your seat, and in your head it's worse. There's a pain. A famine in your heart. An aching to be_ free'.

The words of the eternal combatants drowned out, it took Jessica a moment to release what was happening. It was the ring-tone of her own phone running concurrently in the background. The music? As a caller ID she hadn't yet programmed, it'd been randomly assigned from her sprawling MP3 collection. Something from a beatific, yesteryear Depeche Mode album by the sounds of it. And _how_ randomly.

' _And when our worlds they fall apart, when the walls come tumbling in, though we may deserve it -_ it will be worth it'.

The Unknown Caller abandoned his quest to have his call answered; Jessica returned her attention to the showdown. Ellen was mentally wounded, stricken. She was starting to stare into Myrtlebank's eyes.

And he wasn't backing down. He wasn't embarrassed or rueful as what looked like a wave of crystal-clear tears slipped free from her baggy old eyes. Her stupid make-up ran, just a little.

 _"I'm sorry! Please! I never knew!"_

Myrtlebank stared back at her, gaze the messianic side of unreadable. Intense, tho. He'd have been justified in shaming her further through some magnanimous religious zeal. He'd have been justified, perhaps, in producing a gun from under the table and shooting her in the head.

What followed next was the strangest thing that would ever happen to her; Jessica knew that at once. It was strange for being supernatural, but it was _more_ strange for being absolutely defining. She had blinked. In that familiar fraction-of-a-second of sensing the weight and dampness of her eyelids, something bizarre-beyond-conception took place. Her eyelids opened again to reveal that they'd vanished. In a unit of time, like shooting an arrow through a helicopter's rotorblades -both the weeping, repentant Ellen and the rapt-in-glory Myrtlebank -had _vanished_ from their chairs.

All thought was gone from her mind, but she sensed that she was moving, stumbling towards the compound. The lock on the side entrance had long-since been changed since her day, but she was able to crank it open with a rock, no trouble. The motion did something to accumulate her thoughts, too. She was merely determined.

Rubberised, hospital-style flaps granted her access to the main bay, and then the sub-platforms. The strange, cold-yellow light ebbed into a ravine of open plan and plus-one-size offices. She found Ellen's.

The empty chairs absorbed her gaze for some time. The half-drunk coffee Mary Celested on the side, presumably noxious with hallucinogens. But hallucinogens weren't infectious -and Jessica had never been one to mistake dreaming with reality.

"Jessica?"

Moe was mystified to see his old employee again, though in time this would be the least of his incredulity.

"It's true", she explained, and hardly worrying about the context. "It's all a test. I must have known it in my subconscious. As soon as you see the truth, you just get taken -by God, by a better world. You get taken, then, but the rest of us aren't allowed to know what happened, because if we did, the test would be spoiled".

"I don't understand, Jessica. What are you doing here?"

Moe was frightened. He needn't be. Judged the girl, it's just that miracles are deceptively easy to explain. In the manner of a hug, or unseasonable winter sunlight, something like the weight of the world crept across her shoulders.

She fled the building. How to tell the maximum number of people in the easiest, most methodical way? Her delirious mind scrambled for an answer; in the meantime, she figured on a plan that took her back into the town centre, at no point visiting the Migrant Camps at Calais, at no point tabling a motion at the EU Council. Picture a centuries-dead partisan briefly brought back to life in order to tell humanity the secret of salvation. If there was a drunken belief in willingness of her own countrymen to listen? Well, alcohol exists.

She ran wildly. Her mind -was not exactly unmindful of the strange, metallic whine which had struck up in the near-distance. Partially she screened it out, though it was a joyful and exciting sound anyway; the true nature of reality aligned with her mind, cheering her on through an unearthly whine.

A little way down the track, an ownerless dog was barking like crazy. To Jessica, he'd been anthropomorphized and was laughing, endlessly cheering her on. She rounded the corner and started to laugh herself.

The footbridge across the railway line; she'd forgotten that it had been closed off for the HS1 work. The resounding humour, and almost as powerful in her mind as Myrtlebank's Jim Morrison impression; soon there'd no longer be a reason for yuppies and students to be pied-pipered into the cities, or beyond that to f France. The conceit would be lifted, and people would at last be free, thinking,

 _Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth, and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth._

In the meantime, the remainder of their evil couldn't be allowed to interfere with destiny. She vaulted over the high, spiked fence, down through the dense foliage of the embankment. By now, the unearthly whine was all-powerful, but also indistinguishable from her thoughts. Perhaps, on the other side of the rail track, the first person she'd met and tell the secret to would be the crewcutted girl. It was possible. As she took a step onto the heavy bronze track.

To observe then the huge bouquet of sparks firing from the wheels of an Intercity that had already been running on automatic breaks for some time. Pent-up and murderous impact occurred, seemingly at all points of her body -but still capricious enough to send her into a weird spin that made fun of instantly broken bones, instantly wrenched-apart organs.

But good old head; it retained ability to think, all through the blazing agony. Shock was minimal. Robocop's one good hand detected the fact that it was still holding a phone. Although there was no sense of physical touch in the pads of her skin, she jabbed desperately, opposable thumb only retaining energy and shape enough to do one last thing: press the huge red invitation to return the mysterious missed call.

 _"Hello?"_

"It's happened", she rasped. In a single modulation, her dying breath became hushed and promising. "It worked. The miracle happened".

CD

Robert heard the door swish open. Not looking around, he knew that it was Iron Empire entering like Cosmo Kramer, and ironically since his urban hairstyle was increasing frizzed-up since he'd given his cap away. For the most part, though, his mind was occupied. To the fore came that bizarre tracking that probably takes place 24-7 in _everyone's_ subconscious: what's everyone else in the world doing _right now_? It was suddenly salient. Everything was changing.

"You won't believe this, M8. Have you seen the news?"

"Something's happening", Robert grinned childishly.

"All over the world people are having hysterical fits because people have vanished into nowhere. The Pope has vanished. There's car crashes and stuff".

His mum used to read The National Enquirer, and Robert marveled at how the journalists could find such punchy, dramatic headlines, even when the stories themselves were largely speculative. He marveled at why anyone would want to read such tenuous, celebrity newsprint. It was surely to do with intimacy and high drama, but today everyone in the world was a celebrity, either by sheer staying power or by their sudden absence from Planet Earth. Probably people living now were the biggest celebrities since the twelve disciples, easily matching them in terms of WTF reality.

Just who the new Jesus was remained to be seen. Perhaps there wasn't one. Increasingly, though, he looked at his palms in the style of someone in a movie astonished at their new superpowers.

The nineties. Anyone who'd lived through them invariably had one thought on their minds, and more pressing than any rebel-without-a-cause or hippy conception of Vietnam. Why had the KLF burnt that million quid? Why not give it to charity, or cooler still, put on a million pound bet that their _next_ single would get to number one, too?

Robert understood. He had all the wealth of the world in the palm of his hand. The financial wealth _and_ the spiritual. Perhaps he would burn it. Perhaps he would give it to charity. But he wouldn't try to kid himself that messiah-hood doesn't belong to the bold, the fearless, the lonely.

"It's to do with the people who came around here yesterday".

Iron Empire was open-mouthed. "The ones who said they were doing that experiment to make miracles happen? That acid must have worked some magic somewhere".

Breathed Robert, "It was me. It was all me. I knew they believed what they were saying, and I always believed in religion myself. So I decided to take charge and see if I could make something happen. I didn't sell them acid. It was a placebo. I sold them-"

From down the side of the sofa, he produced some of the cut-up blisters containing nothing more profound -than cough sweets.


End file.
